Dame Alice Ellen Terry was a leading English actress of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Linda Bove Waterstreet is a Deaf American actress, her most notable role being a fictionalized version of herself in the PBS children's series Sesame Street from 1971 to 2002. Bove was the first Deaf actress to be a member of the program's recurring cast.
See Hear is a monthly magazine programme for deaf and hard-of-hearing people in the United Kingdom, broadcast on Wednesday mornings at 8.00am. The programme focuses on the British and the worldwide deaf community and covers a broad range of topics from areas such as education, deaf people's rights, technology and language. The programme is presented entirely in BSL and is broadcast with voice-over and subtitles in English. This allows both deaf and hearing people to understand the programme. See Hear is currently the fifth longest-running BBC programme.
The National Theatre of the Deaf (NTD) is a Connecticut-based theatre company founded in 1967. It is the oldest theatre company in the United States with a continuous history of domestic and international touring, as well as producing original works. NTD productions combine American Sign Language with spoken language to fulfill the theatre's mission statement of linking Deaf and hearing communities, providing more exposure to sign language, and educating the public about Deaf art. The NTD is affiliated with a drama school, also founded in 1967, and with the Little Theatre of the Deaf (LTD), established in 1968 to produce shows for a younger audience.
David Bower is a Welsh actor, best known for his role as David in the hit romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral. Born in Wrexham, North Wales, he is deaf and a BSL user and took his degree in the British Theatre of the Deaf. After university he joined what became the Signdance Collective working as sign dancer and choreographer. The collective was re-established in 2001 with Bower as artistic director and Isolte Avila as Dance Director.
Anton Phillips is a Jamaican-born British actor who found success appearing in British television. He remains best known for his role as Dr. Bob Mathias in the science fiction series Space: 1999. Also a theatre producer and director, he has been involved over the years with many initiatives to showcase high-quality professional theatre by and for black people, including the Carib Theatre Company, co-founded with Yvonne Brewster in 1980.
Canadian Deaf Theatre is Canada's only anglophone deaf professional theatre company. Its philosophy is "A belief in the interest and inherent natural ability of deaf people to act and entertain on a serious professional level and to offer something different from that of the hearing/speaking theatrical medium".
Spring Awakening is a coming-of-age rock musical with music by Duncan Sheik and a book and lyrics by Steven Sater. It is based on the 1891 German play Spring Awakening by Frank Wedekind. Set in late 19th-century Germany, the musical tells the story of teenagers discovering the inner and outer tumult of adolescent sexuality. In the musical, alternative rock is employed as part of the folk-infused rock score.
Keith Wann is an American comedian and performance artist.
Pat Keysell was a presenter of the BBC television series Vision On which ran from 1964 to 1976. She was also a mime artist and administrator.
Russell Wayne Harvard is an American actor. He made his feature film debut in Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007), playing opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as his adopted son, H.W. Plainview. In the 2010 biopic The Hammer, he portrayed deaf NCAA championship wrestler and UFC mixed martial arts fighter Matt Hamill. Harvard also won acclaim Off Broadway in 2012 as Billy, the deaf son in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, hearing British family, in Tribes by Nina Raine. For his interpretation, he won a 2012 Theatre World Award for Outstanding Debut Performance and nominations for Drama League, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Lead Actor. He played Mr. Wrench in the first and third seasons of the television series Fargo.
American Sign Language literature is one of the most important shared cultural experiences in the American deaf community. Literary genres initially developed in residential Deaf institutes, such as American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, which is where American Sign Language developed as a language in the early 19th century. There are many genres of ASL literature, such as narratives of personal experience, poetry, cinematographic stories, folktales, translated works, original fiction and stories with handshape constraints. Authors of ASL literature use their body as the text of their work, which is visually read and comprehended by their audience viewers. In the early development of ASL literary genres, the works were generally not analyzed as written texts are, but the increased dissemination of ASL literature on video has led to greater analysis of these genres.
Bernard Bragg was a deaf actor, producer, director, playwright, artist, and author who is notable for being a co-founder of the National Theatre of the Deaf and for his contributions to Deaf performing culture. According to The New York Times, Bragg was "regarded by many as the leading professional deaf actor in the country".
Sophie Leigh Stone is an English stage and television actress. She was the first deaf student to win a place at the drama school RADA. she is best known for her roles as Louise in Two Doors Down and Doctor Who as Cass. In 2022, she joined the cast of the new Acorn TV detective series The Chelsea Detective, playing the forensics officer Ashley Wilton. She continued to play that role in season 2 in 2023.
Bruce Michael Mackintosh Hlibok was an American deaf actor.
Jean St. Clair is an English actor, screenwriter, director, producer and British Sign Language consultant. She has twice won Best Actress at the French deaf film festival Clin d'Oeil. St. Clair is Deaf and a British Sign Language user.
Charlotte Arrowsmith is a British actor and theatre director. She is Deaf and uses British Sign Language.
Paula Garfield is a British theatre director and actress. She is Deaf and a British Sign Language user. In 2002 she co-founded the theatre company Deafinitely Theatre.
Troy Michael Kotsur is an American actor. Born deaf, Kotsur made his acting debut in the late 1980s working with the National Theatre of the Deaf. His television debut was in a 2001 episode of Strong Medicine and his film debut was in the 2007 thriller The Number 23.
Deaf theatre's, is a alternative form of theater which is a collaboration of deaf actors or actresses. Using open space, the performers use gesture, dance, and sign language to perform to a audience. Production teams create theatre in their respective signed languages and many companies choose to have both hearing performers and deaf performers for a dual-language experience while some offer solely signed performances.
